People read for a variety of reasons: for enjoyment, for education, to research a particular topic, for business-related information-gathering, for reference purposes or to keep in touch with current affairs, to name but a few. Every day around the world, a vast amount of human time, effort and mental energy goes into reading.
Most of this effort is lost. Even those with good memories will remember only a small proportion of the content that they read. A larger proportion may be remembered in a vague way, but finding previously read material again is a difficult task and conveying that vague knowledge to others even harder.
Over the centuries, various attempts to tackle this problem have been made. People annotate books by writing in the margins, they insert bookmarks or use Post-It™ notes to identify favorite passages, they take clippings from newspapers and they photocopy pages. Others transcribe passages onto note cards or compose bibliographies.
These solutions, though, all have limitations. No one solution is appropriate for recording items of interest in all situations. Writing annotations in the margin, for example, is only appropriate for the owner of the book. Many of the solutions employ a physical medium that is not always available, such as post-it notes. Others are inconvenient in other ways. Photocopying requires large expensive machines, and handwritten transcriptions are time-consuming.
Lastly, none of the aforementioned methods of recording afford users the convenience and flexibility we have come to associate with electronic data; the ability to copy, edit, search, classify, annotate and distribute information with ease. The digital solutions that come closest to capturing printed content of interest have been scanning combined with traditional OCR techniques, which is inconvenient and unreliable, and manual transcription by re-typing, which is time-consuming.